Philip Jones Griffiths

UPDATE Monday 21 March 12.25pm GMT… news just posted on The New York Times website… Libya Releases 4 Times Journalists http://nyti.ms/flAz1P Hurray!

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From left: Addario, Moore, Pickett, Poupin, and Hicks.

Photos: Paul Conroy/ Reuters /

As I’m sure all of you know by now, Lynsey Addario and Tyler Hicks along with videographer Stephen Farrell, and NYT”s Beirut bureau chief Anthony Shadid went missing in Libya earlier this week (the news on NPPA / NYT ). The team were later reported to have been detained my Gaddafi’s security forces. On Friday, New York Times reported that that the Libyan government had promised to release the Times journalists. It has passed 6pm GMT on Saturday,when I’m writing this, and unfortunately it seems that the Libyans haven’t kept their word. I hope Addario, Hicks, Farrell, and Shadid will be released as soon as possible. My fear is that the coalition launched attacks on Libya have complicated the matter quite a bit…

If you’d like to see Christopher’s own edit, you can see it on his website here.

Having browsed his site today, I noticed a link to this good piece on the Digital Journalist about him, from 2001…At the bottom of the page there’s nine videos with Morris, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to view them…maybe you have better luck…

Take another look at the photo on top of this post..I noticed that Yuri Kozyrev has a photo of the same scene (see below) in his Libya gallery on TIME website …Taken almost the exact same moment…I think it’s Kozyrev’s legs behind Hicks… So his is like a photo within a photo (see them side by side here)…First thing that comes to mind is that both Conroy and Kozyrev have a lot of guts to continue taking photos in a situation that must have been rather threatening as Addario and Co are already running away from the scene…Another is that it seems like there were loads of photographers- well at least seven – at this scene…As I mentioned regarding the Egypt turmoil, it’s not surprising photographers move in pacts in dangerous situations, but at the same it means that there’s a lot of overlap between their work, and the viewers will not not get as comprehensive coverage of each conflict as they’d might first imagine having looked at several photographers’ work.

Photo: Yuri Kozyrev

Another thing about Kozyrev’s photo and a lot of photos on TIME’s photo galleries for that matter…I’ve noticed they often seem to look really nice in terms of what I call ‘punchiness’ ( good mix of contrast/saturation) and generally better processed than photographs on most other sites…To me that is evident even by comparing for instance the above Kozyrev frame with the top one by Conroy… I’ve often wondered if they have a person working on the files at the picture desk to give them a certain look… I wouldn’t be too surprised if it were so…Although this might of course be just a silly assumption of mine, and I really don’t know the inner workings of TIME’s picture desk, or any others’ for that matter, but do have a look for yourself, photos in their galleries do often seem to look really well – but not overly – processed.

I was hoping on Tuesday that we could also see some of James Nachtwey’s work from Japan in TIME’s Lightbox, and my wishes came true…The below photograph is one of the most remarkable in the series, in my opinion….cars floating like dead fishes…

I’ve raved about Simon Wheatley’s London grime work plenty of times during this blog’s 3+ years history, and it was great to hear last year that the work was going to come out as a book…I’ve shared some links related to the book several times before, but here’s one more from BJP earlier this week.. It features spreads from the book, so take a look…

My friend Laia Abril did some work in Scotland recently on a girl suffering from bulimia… The stills were published in D Repubblica in Italy…and you can see the tear sheets on her website…

I’ve also seen a great multimedia that Laia had put together on the same girl, a piece she is still pitching around, and hopefully someone picks it up. I will share the link here, of course, once that happens…

And another one of my sponsors, Neon Sky, is offering something new.. Check it out…

Websites – Neon Sky : “The Neon Sky portfolio website service now includes the ability to create up to three sites, each at its own domain, for one price. The Neon Sky service is $45 per month with a one-time $350 setup fee.”

Exhibitions - Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties : J. Paul Getty Museum : Los Angeles : June 29-November 14, 2010 : “In the decades following World War II, an independently minded and critically engaged form of photography began to gather momentum. Since then a host of photographers have combined their skills as reporters and artists, developing extended photographic essays that delve deeply into humanistic topics and present distinct personal visions of the world. Embracing the gray areas between objectivity and subjectivity, information and interpretation, journalism and art, they have created powerful visual reports that transcend the realm of traditional photojournalism. Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography since the Sixties looks in-depth at projects by photographers who have contributed to the development of this approach, including Leonard Freed, Lauren Greenfield, Philip Jones Griffiths, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey, Sebastião Salgado, W. Eugene Smith, and Larry Towell.”